The Scarlet Letter (Summarized Edition)

Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, The Scarlet Letter traces Hester Prynne's public shaming for adultery and the hidden complicities binding Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and the uncanny child Pearl. Hawthorne fashions a dark romance whose ceremonious prose and intrusive narrator weave allegory and psychological realism. Emblems—the crimson A, scaffold, and forest—structure scenes of light an...